Firstly, thanks to those who posted. I just do not understand how the non-greedy operator works.
Using the following code: import re s = "qry_Lookup.desc = CSS_Rpt1.desc AND qry_Lookup.lcdu1 = CSS_Rpt1.lcdu" pat = "(.+=)+?(.+)" m = re.match(pat, s) if m is None: print "No Match" else: for mat in m.groups(): print mat I would expect that the first group would match one or more times with the fewest amount of text. However the result is: >qry_Lookup.desc = CSS_Rpt1.desc AND qry_Lookup.lcdu1 = > CSS_Rpt1.lcdu The first match of the "=" char is still greedy. I would have expected: qry_Lookup.desc = > CSS_Rpt1.desc AND qry_Lookup.lcdu1 > = > CSS_Rpt1.lcdu I'm obviously missing something because the non-greedy match seems to not be acting as expected. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Chris ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) On Feb 5, 9:31 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hello again - > > I do not seem to be able to get a handle on non-greedy pattern > matching. > > I am trying to parse the following - note that there are no line > breaks in the string: > > " FROM ((qry_Scores_Lookup1 INNER JOIN CSS_Rpt1 ON > (qry_Scores_Lookup1.desc = CSS_Rpt1.desc) AND > (qry_Scores_Lookup1.lastcdu = CSS_Rpt1.lastcdu))" > > What I would like to do is be able to split on the "AND" and the "=" > to come up with the following: > qry_Scores_Lookup1.desc > CSS_Rpt1.desc > qry_Scores_Lookup1.lastcdu > CSS_Rpt1.lastcdu > > The following is one of my many attempts to do this: > > import re > > s= " FROM ((qry_Scores_Lookup1 INNER JOIN CSS_Rpt1 ON > (qry_Scores_Lookup1.desc = CSS_Rpt1.desc) AND > (qry_Scores_Lookup1.lastcdu = CSS_Rpt1.lastcdu))" > > pat = " FROM .+ (?:INNER|LEFT|RIGHT) JOIN .+ ON (?:AND)*?((.+)=(.+))" > > m = re.match(pat, s) > > if m is None: > print "No Match" > else: > for mat in m.groups(): > print mat > > My pattern does not even come close. > > Any help would be greatly appreciated. My goal is to analyse a large > number of SQL querys to try to identify the join field and see where > indexing might make sense. > > While I am mostly interested in understanding regular expressions, I > would also be interested in knowing about any Python SQL parsers out > there. > > Thanks in advance. > > Chris ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list